


the heart and stomach of a king

by icygrace



Series: royal commands [4]
Category: Reign (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arranged Marriages, F/M, France - Freeform, Gen, Scotland, Sequel, some people are just mentioned
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-10-16 11:07:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10570050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icygrace/pseuds/icygrace
Summary: Being royal isn't always easy. Sequel to "and on your head a crown;" each part in that universe, but a self-contained unit.





	1. Kenna

**Author's Note:**

> This has been planned for a year and a half and won’t be changed in light of recent episodes of Reign.

When the Infanta Isabella of Spain is eight, her eccentric cousin Rudolf is elected Holy Roman Emperor and immediately repudiates their betrothal, declaring that he will never marry anyone. Her mother Elisabeth de Valois then proposes a match between her daughter and one of her nephews. Specifically, she demands nine-year-old Charlie, who was once briefly betrothed to Isabella’s younger sister, the late Infanta Catherine Michelle, and is now promised to their cousin, Princess Madeleine of Navarre.

 

Young Isabella is said to be a delicate beauty like her mother, unblemished by the smallpox that afflicted her and killed her sister. More importantly, Isabella stands to inherit the whole of her father Philip’s dominions, as Don Carlos is dead and Elisabeth seems increasingly unlikely to bear him a son who will thrive. Since her second daughter’s death, Elisabeth has only had one other child survive infancy, a daughter called Maria Fernanda, named for her great-great-grandfather Ferdinand of Aragon, with whom she shares a birthday.

 

It is apparent that Elisabeth envisions a grand future, France and Spain united under their children’s rule, and Kenna cannot say it is a vision she dislikes; it is a coup for them, a coup greater than she could ever have dreamed, for what is Navarre to Spain?

 

\---

 

And so, after much thought, she and Bash decide to renege on her long-ago agreement with Louis of Navarre and weigh the benefits and dangers of offering a sure-to-be-furious Louis their younger son in Charlie’s stead.

 

“I don’t think I could bear it,” Kenna sighs unhappily as Greer and Adelaide help her think over their options. They are not queens, but they are mothers, and surely they will understand her reservations. “Sending Francis to Navarre, and so soon.”

 

She will lose Tara to the Stuarts and Scotland in three years and the idea alone is already hard enough to bear. Sharing her six-year-old son with a man she cannot trust will surely be too much for her.

 

“Why would you need to send him to Navarre now?” Adelaide asks with a furrowed brow.

 

“He’d be Madeleine’s king consort someday, so Louis will expect him to be educated in Navarre. And to control that education entirely,” Greer explains. “With Charlie, his future as King of France would have trumped his future as king consort of Navarre.”

 

“But surely you would still be in a position of power in these negotiations,” Adelaide says to her. “Navarre is as nothing to France. Couldn’t you set the terms to your taste?”

 

“Louis is third in line to the French throne after my sons. We need to do whatever we have to to make sure that his interests are aligned with ours so he doesn’t set his sights on it.”

 

“And doesn’t do something rash like divorce Claude and have legitimate sons to set their sights on it after him,” Greer adds.

 

\---

 

Louis has had plenty of dalliances over the years with no issue. But his latest lover, Lady Isabelle de Limeuil, an exceptionally beautiful distant cousin of Claude’s and former lady-in-waiting to Kenna who kept his interest for nearly two years, was brought to bed of a boy at Fontainebleau the previous year. It had been a scandal and it had infuriated Claude.

 

And hurt Claude despite herself, Kenna suspects. Claude loves her daughters; it is her daughters – not fear for her soul or desire to keep her crown – that stop her from divorcing her husband or petitioning for the annulment of her marriage anew. But Lady Isabelle gave their father a son and that is something she will never be able to do. And more importantly, the child was living proof that Louis did not pine away for love of her; though that was something she already knew, the boy made it _real_.

 

Sometimes she wonders what would happen if Louis forced the matter, said he would no longer stand for being so openly cuckolded, demanded that Claude break off with Leith for good and remain in Navarre with him, and threatened to end their marriage if she didn’t agree to his conditions. For all that Claude claims she would be thrilled if Louis ended their marriage, Kenna sometimes wonders if it is truly the case. Sometimes she thinks that, for all that Claude once chafed at the arrangement, she now prefers keeping both men tied to her, whether by love or by law.

 

Kenna sees – they all see – the shadows in the eyes of the king’s deputy when Louis of Navarre and Princess Madeleine appear at Fontainebleau. Privately, she suspects that it is less the behavior of Madeleine – the child named for his mother who, though only a few months shy of seven, now seems to have some understanding of what he is to _her_ mother and that therefore he must be snubbed – and more that the woman whose heart he can otherwise pretend he claims entirely finds her way back to the bed of the man who has a claim to the rest of her.

 

\---

 

Of course, Claude’s fury was utterly hypocritical on several counts. There was Leith and the fact that their relationship of over half a decade is an open secret at court. There was also the fact that it was Claude herself, with Kenna’s help, who had discreetly nudged Lady Isabelle into Louis’s path. Claude meant to draw him to court more frequently so that she could spend more time with her elder daughter without going to Navarre; she is more often at their court than her husband’s because Leith is here. Kenna meant to keep an eye on him, so despite Claude’s lasting distrust of her, they worked together. But neither of them expected that the liaison would result in a child, a child with the same dark looks Claude’s daughters share with their father, a boy who seemed likely to survive and thrive. Neither of them was pleased about it.

 

But then Kenna sent Lady Isabelle away to a convent to punish her for the indiscretion of so public a dénouement to her liaison with the King of Navarre and the child was sent to Navarrese court, entrusted to the care of a nanny and a raft of nursemaids, where he died of a fever shortly after.

 

\---

 

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Kenna says.

 

“Then perhaps this is the best idea,” Adelaide says. “Princess Madeleine is so sweet-tempered. Clearly her upbringing hasn’t spoiled her.”

 

Madeleine has spent the majority of her young life in Navarre with her father, who was expected to turn her over – officially, into Kenna’s keeping – to be brought up as the next Queen of France upon her seventh birthday, which is only two months away. Unofficially, he likely would have spent more and more time at Fontainebleau, jockeying with his wife for influence over their firstborn.

 

“That’s true.”

 

If anything, Margot is the spoiled one, coddled by Claude and Leith. For Margot, Leith is more her father than Louis will ever be. But if anyone were ever to ask, Princess Marguerite de Bourbon of Navarre – affectionately known as Margot – is, of course, so named for her paternal aunt the Duchess de Nevers, not because of her petal-soft skin.

 

And her elder sister Madeleine is named for their maternal great-grandmother Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, mother of Catherine de Medici, or in the alternative, for their paternal aunt the Abbess of Sainte Croix de Poitiers, not for the mother of Queen Claude’s long-time lover.

 

Though Louis obviously dotes on Madeleine, it seems they are both quite aware that she will be a queen someday, that her life is not only about her own pleasure, that is not her own at all, even though she is still a little girl.

 

“And they spend plenty of time here at court,” Adelaide points out. Unlike Margot, Madeleine remains always with their father, who refuses to let her out of his sight and returns to Fontainebleau from time to time so as not to separate her from her mother and her sister for overlong stretches of time.

 

“Hmm,” she says. “I suppose Francis could return with them then and stay on. He need not spend so very much time in Navarre. Only a handful of months each year.”

 

“And yet . . . Francis won’t have anything to fear from him, but will Charlie?” Greer asks grimly.

 

“He certainly would,” Kenna admits.

 

And still, in the end, there is only one thing she feels they can do.

 

\---

 

Although the words taste vile and bitter on her tongue, she makes the awful but practical point that despite being the second son, Francis could easily ascend the throne someday: Henry was a second son and Bash is the third of his sons to be king.

 

Bash blanches to hear it said so starkly, but she soldiers on and tries not to dwell on how quickly Louis assents after that, even though he remains angry. She only warns him that he would be the first suspect should any harm befall her firstborn son.

 

Then she hires an additional taster and insists that anything Charlie uses regularly be cleaned regularly, that he never be the first person to put on his own clothes, that he never be left unprotected. If someone tries to slit his throat, as an assassin succeeded in doing to poor Jean, or to stab him, as in the attempt against Bash before their wedding, they will not succeed.


	2. Tara

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her life at Scottish court is not at all what she expected it to be.

She cries rivers at the idea of leaving her parents and younger siblings, but it consoles her to think that she will be returning to Scotland and not going to some unknown country.

\---

The reports called Prince James – Jamie, as he is called by his intimates to distinguish him from the king; Rothesay, for the duchy bestowed on the crown prince, as he is called by those who cannot act overfamiliar – handsome and clever and charming.

She knows there are few men – and certainly few, if any, royal men – as uxorious as her father, but she cannot deny that she has some hope for a happy marriage when they wed in France, when she sees for herself how handsome her new husband is and how attentively he treats her.

Nor can she deny that that hope is utterly snuffed out in Scotland when her uncle, at her insistence, identifies the woman he glowered at so fiercely during the grand Holyroodhouse festivities in honor of her marriage. “Lady Eleanor Bolton. His mistress. I was certain he would send her away before he left to marry you, so she would be gone before you arrived.”

The reports – at least the reports that made it to her virgin eyes and ears – did not mention her new husband’s mistress and his two bastards by two previous lovers.

She flushes with humiliation after Callum explains the slight her new husband has inflicted on her. She knows she will never be able to forgive it.

She knew she could not expect Prince James to be the sort of husband her father is to her mother. But she also cannot squash entirely her disappointment at seeing that he did not give up the mistress she did not even know he had when they married, that he did not, in her opinion, give their marriage a real chance to succeed. She knows she is beautiful and clever and charming herself – not because of obsequious courtiers in France or Scotland, but because of those close enough not lie to her – and she wonders why she was not appealing enough for her husband to even bother trying.

Callum squeezes her hand gently, so gently she wants to cry. She knows he will be her one steadfast ally at Holyrood, unloved princess as she will be, but she knows he cannot be at her side always; he has a new wife at home in Tarras – the place she, too, has secretly always considered home.

Edinburgh is nothing like the family seat she was named for and she hates it. Her life at Scottish court is not at all what she expected it to be either and she hates it, too. What Tara hates most of all, of course, is her husband.

\---

Two bastards become three because, as she learns nearly immediately, Lady Eleanor is with child. Although rumor has it that Lady Eleanor carries poorly, two boys nevertheless become three. Three boys their doting young father reportedly adores.

She shuts her eyes to it and ignores them, wishing to forget the boys’ very existence. She decides also to think of her husband as little more than a stud horse and she herself a broodmare to bear his legitimate children, as their marriage is nothing more than a practical arrangement of duty meant to cement the peace between France and Scotland, between Father and King James, through their children. His indifference will not smart that way.

But for her, there is not even a hint of a possible pregnancy. Within the year, her consistently empty womb has a not insignificant number of courtiers – courtiers who were already dismissive because of her husband’s obvious indifference toward her – calling her barren behind her back.

After two years, many call for her to be set aside. She half-wishes she would be; she knows her parents would not reproach her for it. She knows if she told them how unhappy she truly is they would be the first to call for her marriage to be annulled, but she won’t complain. She has a duty to them and to France. Perhaps in time she can – if she ever manages to provide her husband heirs – find happiness outside her marriage as her aunt the Queen of Navarre has done with the handsome, gentle Duke of Valentinois, who looks at her as though she walks on water.

\---

The one thing that lifts her spirits is a promised visit home – to her other home, in France, where most of her family remains. Now that the king has appointed a new ambassador to France, there will be a suitable party to accompany her to see the people dearest to her. Before she can depart, however, she must be thoroughly examined by a physician. It is the same examination she regularly endures, and every time it is humiliating, knowing the result will always be the same.

She knows well the reason it must be done a final time before she departs: according to the king’s dour Protestant advisors, her father’s court is entirely debauched. They want to ensure that she does not return to Scotland with a little cuckoo for the royal nest. If she is not pregnant now and returns so, they will know she betrayed her vows, that the child she carries is illegitimate. If she is pregnant, she’ll be forbidden to leave for fear of disturbing the long-awaited pregnancy.

The morning of the examination, she wakes up craving pomegranates.

\----

“No. No, no, no,” she sobs when the physician tells her what he surely believes is good news.

His eyes are wide with confusion. “Your Highness.” He hesitates. “Is there some . . . reason, in particular, you are upset?” It’s delicately worded, but she hears the are you an adulteress? very clearly. She knows there are things that can be done for mothers of unwanted children. Her mother had told her that much.

“I – I – I want to go home,” she sobs, becoming far more honest than a princess ought to be. Yet another sign; women with child are said to have very little control over their emotions. She hates it here and she’s so alone and – “Finally I’m supposed to go home, but now I won’t be allowed and –” Her parents always indulged her strong-willed ways, Father in particular, but she doubts King James is above locking her in a tower to keep her here now that she carries his heir’s first legitimate child.

The physician squeezes her hand, but quickly draws his own away, seeming surprised at his own presumptuousness.

She sniffs. “It is the only thing I want, to go home. Do you really have to tell them?” The king, the queen, her husband.

“I must, Your Highness. You know I must.”

She swipes at her eyes and squares her shoulders. “Very well.”

\---

The king and queen, who have become positively icy as time has passed, host a grand feast in her honor. Her husband seems more shocked than anything else.

She is thoroughly miserable and unable to eat a bite of it, her disappointment curdling in her stomach.

Her mother-in-law smiles knowingly and pats her hand, saying she’d been just so in the early days of her first pregnancy. She has been much kinder of late. “Surely it will be a boy,” Queen Agnes says.

After her firstborn, Queen Agnes bore only daughters, three of whom – Elizabeth, Annabel, and Margaret – survived to adulthood. Elizabeth and Annabel are both recently married, their absence felt keenly at court and by their mother. Tara was never particularly close to the princesses.

“Only a boy would be so bothersome!”

It’s not that. It’s that she saw the Scottish delegation to France off this morning and cried from the moment the ship left the dock until she could no longer see it on the horizon, so frustrated that she was unable to get herself on it that she could hardly bear it. The disappointment drained her so that she has no interest in food and no energy to force herself to eat it.

It seems the servants understand her better than Queen Agnes does; she hears one maid whisper to another that night, I’ve never seen a woman who took so long to get with child so unhappy when she finally did.

\---

She is listless and remains thoroughly miserable, and if she could summon the energy to feel strongly about anything, she would hate being pregnant. She’s forbidden to do the things she enjoys most, like riding and hunting. The latter isn’t considered particularly ladylike, but her father always indulged her in their shared pastimes.

Dr. Macdonald frowns over her listlessness, but she can’t bring herself to care.

The only thing her pregnancy is good for is an excuse to retire from court activities. No one questions it; no one wishes to displease her now.

\---

Her baby girl is not stillborn, but for how long she lives and breathes after birth, she might as well have been. It would have hurt less.

She was not a wanted child, Tara reminds herself, but it does her no good. It only makes it all hurt more.

\---

Now that they know she is not barren, her husband comes to her bed more often once Dr. Macdonald declares she is fit for marital congress again. And just as she begins making new plans for a trip to France, she learns she has fallen pregnant again.

She is as listless as she was the first time, if not more. This time, the king and queen are more cautious and decide they will wait before sharing the news widely. Perhaps they fear a miscarriage will follow her ill-fated daughter.

“Talk to her,” she hears her mother-in-law hiss outside her bedchamber one day.

Then she hears a knock at the door. “Come in.”

Her husband enters and, uninvited, sits down on the bed beside her.

When he reaches for her, she recoils unintentionally from the hand he places over hers. She is entirely unused to his touch other than when he is bedding her.

He flinches, but soldiers on valiantly. “It’s come to my attention that you were very disappointed not to go to France and I’m sorry to hear it. I know it wouldn’t be the same, but I . . . I wonder if you might at least like to visit your relatives at Tarras for a time.”

“Do you wish me out of sight because Lady Eleanor will be jealous?”

One of her faithful few French attendants came to her with gossip about Lady Eleanor’s fury when she learned of her first pregnancy at the same time the rest of the court did. As far as she knows, Lady Eleanor has not been pregnant again since the birth of her first and only child.

“You needn’t concern yourself for a long while. I hardly leave my rooms as it is and I don’t intend to change my habits any time soon,” she points out sensibly. She nearly touches her belly, but she has worked so hard to ignore the slow curving of her abdomen that she doesn’t wish to draw attention to it today.

He flushes a dull brick red. “That’s not it at all. It’s only that . . . the physician thinks some time away from court would do you good. My mother agrees, and I believe they both know more about such matters than I.”

“Fine,” she acquiesces.

\---

Her toddling little cousin flies out of the small crowd – consisting of her uncle, his wife with their baby boy at her hip, and their servants – congregated outside Livingston House to greet her, heedless of Tara’s grand status despite her mother’s embarrassed admonitions. It brings a smile to her face, an expression that does not come naturally after going unneeded and unused for so long. She drops to a knee to hug the darling girl, ignoring the horrified looks of her entourage.

Callum follows more slowly, but no less eagerly, behind her, along with Clementine, who curtsies after handing their son to his nurse. “Your servant, Your Highness,” Callum says, sweeping a perfect bow when she rises from the hug.

Besides the fact that they are family and close family at that, they are only seven years apart in age. It seems ridiculous to stand on ceremony. “Oh God, if you do that again –”

He laughs. “I had to,” he whispers. “Or else your attendants would have had vapors. They might still.”

“Would it be horribly bad form to send them all back to Holyrood?” she whispers back.

“Terribly awful form.”

“I might still do it.”

“Tara,” Callum warns, serious now.

“I know.” She wants to sulk, but it would be an awful example to little Claire. Even in France, she would only indulge in sulks out of Victoire’s sight. “Will you take me riding out on the old paths? I was always too little for them on my own.”

“And have my head chopped off for endangering the king’s grandchild? Are you mad? You must be mad. Even if I managed to evade him, there’d be your mother and father to do me in and God knows they’re both terrifying when it comes to any of you four.”

She can’t help herself; she pouts then. Still, she does mean it when she says it’s so very good to be home.

\---

At Tarras, she is more herself again.

Eventually, she does send all her attendants back to Holyrood save the midwife and one of her ladies, the most sensible of her women and one of her few French attendants who remains, who mostly keeps out of the way.

She reads in the garden and takes long walks with Callum or Clementine along the paths she always wanted to ride properly and it is almost enough.

She enjoys spending time with Claire, recalls herself as a child a few years older who doted near-obsessively on her younger brother, and begins to think motherhood might not be so awful. In fact, it might be a solace in the viper’s nest that is Holyrood. “You’ll be good for me, won’t you?” she asks her child one day, rubbing the now prominent curve of her belly.

The baby kicks in response. She hopes that is a yes.

\---

When she receives the long-dreaded message from Holyrood to arrange for her return, she writes that the midwife believes she should not travel, that it would be best for the child for her to remain where she is. She half-expects a larger retinue to arrive for her to drag her back to court kicking and screaming, but the queen is surprisingly understanding, writing back _Jamie and Dr. Macdonald will come to you. As you will not have your own mother at your side as I once did, I shall endeavor to join you all if James can do without me here at court._

By the time Dr. Macdonald and her husband arrive, she’s grown so heavy with child that the good doctor and the midwife agree that she must be carrying twins this time. She is not as sure as they are; she recalls when her mother carried Francis. Mother said they wondered if she might she having twins, but she only had one particularly strapping boy. Dimly, she recalls holding both her brothers in her skinny little girl arms, sitting back in the protective circle of Uncle Andrew’s arms and later Father’s, in case she should drop them. She remembers how slight Charlie was, how Francis felt more substantial, though the differences between them have not been so drastic as they’ve grown.

Tears prick her eyes at the thought that it’s been nearly four years since she last saw her brothers; they are now 16 and 13. Soon enough they will be men truly and that thought triggers the gathering tears, causes them to cascade down her cheeks, alarming her husband and her uncle and Clementine. She swipes at her eyes with one hand and waves them off with the other. “I just missed my brothers very much all of a sudden, that’s all.” It’s not that she doesn’t care about Victoire, truly it isn’t, but Victoire was only 6 when she left and a quieter child than even Charlie. She simply does not know her younger sister as well as she does her brothers and she never will. And even her brothers have surely changed and will continue to change. Those thoughts trigger further tears that she cannot hold back, tears that make Clementine start, Callum jump up from his seat, and the physician murmur something about a calming tisane.

But it is her husband who takes action: he makes their apologies and rises from his place to escort her to her bedchamber, leaving behind the half-full plate he was still eagerly tucking into before her outburst.

\---

After her husband leaves the maid to help her prepare for bed, she assumes he has left for the evening, but she is wrong.

Instead, he returns, dressed for bed himself. “May I?” he asks before sitting down beside her on the bed.

She nods, wondering why he is here. He never comes to her without a reason, and it is always the same.

“Tell me about them. Your brothers.”

It’s as gently as he’s ever spoken to her, so she obeys. She is surprised by how good it feels, if bittersweet, to talk of the people she loves and misses most.

Her husband listens attentively for quite a while, even asking questions and laughing when appropriate, but she talks so long that he eventually slides into a reclining position to listen more comfortably.

At some point, for lack of anything better to do with her hands as she prattles on, she begins to run her fingers through his hair.

“That’s nice,” he says sleepily.

She realizes that he’s begun to tire, though she herself is unlikely to fall asleep soon because the child kicks so fiercely, so she thanks him for listening to her. “Thank you, James.” In the four years they’ve been married, she rarely addresses him or thinks of him by name. He is always her husband. When she does, it is neither the familiar Jamie or the distant Rothesay, but James.

“Jamie,” he mumbles. “James is my father.”

“Jamie,” she repeats. “Thank you.”

“Glad you talked,” he mumbles sleepily. “You never talk.”

 _To me_ goes unspoken. _You never talk_ to me.

“I’m glad, too,” she whispers, remembering the vivacious, loquacious girl she once was and wondering whether that girl might rise from the watery depths someday.

\---

When they finally return to court after a long convalescence that allows her to regain her strength, she quickly realizes that returning with two healthy boys is not the only thing that has raised her stock. Retreating to her birthplace has reminded the nobles that their prince’s wife is not only French, but half-Scots herself.

Her sweet boys are her husband in miniature, save for her eyes. Much to her surprise, Jamie has told her that pleases him very much.

She blushed to hear it. She does not wish to get up her hopes – the hopes she brought from France as a young bride, tucked as carefully in her heart as her unmentionables were in her trousseau – only to have them dashed again. But she cannot help but notice that, while his other children remain in the royal nursery, the mistress who has plagued her all her years in Edinburgh is gone.

Perhaps . . . Perhaps.

His bastard sons she will take an interest in, she decides. She will treat them with kindness rather than indifference now and will eventually win them over, so that they may have a close and loving relationship with her sons as her father had with his own younger brothers while they lived, so that they will not fear her as her father did Catherine de Medici.

As for Jamie, only time will tell.


End file.
